I get off at ten past I'm never going out with you: A study on dissociative syntactic amalgams.

This paper explores what I call Dissociative Syntactic Amalgam (DSA) constructions, observed in conversation parts of fictional varieties of English, such as film/TV scripts and novels. I provide 27 cases of DSAs, most of which come from Corpus of Contemporary American English and Movie Corpus. A paradigm example is I get off at ten past I'm never going out with you (as an answer to What time do you get off (work) tonight?), where I'm never going out with you is clausal but fills a nominal slot. In DSAs, the speaker initially lures the hearer to create a positive expectation (e.g., I can go out with her), but the speaker 'dissociates' herself from this expectation, that is, expresses her negative attitude (e.g., irritation) towards it. DSAs have received little (if any) analytic attention, and this paper aims to fill this gap in the literature. More specifically, I describe interpretive aspects of DSAs in comparison with the standard cases of syntactic amalgams (e.g., Ken sent you'll never guess how many letters to Naomi) and develop a cognitive–pragmatic account in relevance theory, explicating the interpretive path a hearer takes in comprehending a DSA utterance. • Identifying the Dissociative Syntactic Amalgam (DSA) construction. • Considering the ways in which a speaker conveys a variety of emotive meanings. • Presenting a theory-neutral description of interpretive aspects of DSAs. • Developing a cognitive–pragmatic account of DSAs in relevance theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]